


Living Within

by hyunjiniac



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Among Us (Video Game) Setting, Angst, Fluff, Love Triangle, M/M, Murder Mystery, Probably will have smut, alternative universe, among us inspired, changlix, i am sorry in advance if your bias dies, lovestruck minho, minchan, space travel, stray kids au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 10:28:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29948619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyunjiniac/pseuds/hyunjiniac
Summary: Minho, the newly appointed captain of the Stray ship on its mission to discover other forms of life in the universe, discovers a nearly destroyed space shuttle while on his navigation control. Upon investigation, he and his alerted team discover a single survivor, Bang Chan. He’s rescued and brought on board, then gradually affiliated with the entire team and even accepted as the second leader alongside Minho. However, three months into his stay, Minho finds himself falling for Chan. Hard. He finds comfort in his very presence, but that proves a vice once the events on the ship start spiralling into chaos and despair.
Relationships: Bang Chan/Lee Minho | Lee Know, Lee Felix/Seo Changbin
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Living Within

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING | May include heavy topics and depictions of violence or other potentially triggering or heavy topics. In the case of a smut chapter, a warning will be put to signal it so you can skip if you wish.
> 
> THIS IS UNEDITED.

If there was one thing Minho never regretted about his pursued dream of space travel, it was the privilege to witness a sky unaffected by the tainted touch of Earth. Millions, billions of stars flickered upon a canvas of navy and magenta no matter what time he looked upon the glass surfaces of the ship, and not once did the view fail to mesmerize him. It was so much more elegant but striking than any movie or book ever attempted to embody, speckled and splashed with the purest of palettes of bolds and pastels alike no human could ever produce with their mere two hands. The sky, this sky; it was the sole reason a life on Earth would never measure. Loneliness on a floating chunk of metal in the vast void of the unlimited universe was a comfort no one else could understand but him. He was alright with that.

The crew had been asleep for some hours, perhaps three or four but he couldn’t know. His watch’s battery had died days ago and Changbin kept forgetting to bring him one. He tapped light fingers across its greasy glass, then hooked them on his suit’s rough collar and shifted it along his neck, scratching at the faint red marks the zipper always left. With a huff, he averted his eyes from the flickering control system plastered in front of him like a platter of colour, instead basking upon the majestic image of the galaxy unfolding beyond a comprehensible distance. Behind a layer of fairy lights was a crack of crimson and ebony swirling together in a spider-like nebula. The Black Widow, he called it regardless of their home station’s demands that it was some gibberish conglomeration of too easily forgettable letters and numbers.

A beep from somewhere across the room. It echoed in the darkness like an orchestra of flutes and violins, catching Minho’s attention immediately. With his interest perked up, he slid his feet from the cushion of his seat and stood, back cracking in the process. Slowly, assuring his steps got no louder than the meagre repetitive beeping itself, he crossed the grey flooring until he stood in front of the communication board, scanning the hundreds of buttons and lights. Finally, his eyes landed upon one. A tiny, octagonal red button flickering in sync with its beeps. He was never good with remembering Jeongin’s arrangements, so it took a while to map out the progression of functions he remembered before placing it. A distress call. 

With what energy carried his tired legs across the room, Minho walked past his chair in the centre of the large control room, ending instead at the intercom control system. Pressing a finger roughly against the single button plastered on the wall so carelessly-- Minho hated how out of place it looked-- he cleared his throat, sending feedback echo through the halls.

“We’ve got a signal. I repeat, we’ve got a signal.” As his finger left the button, his heart rate picked up a gradual but ever-rising pace. The muscles around his ribcage contracted and, ever-so-faintly, patches of adrenaline rushed like poison in his bloodstream, causing his hands to shake. He parted from the intercom and returned to the communication control board. The urge to press that damn flickering red was a force stronger than thirst.

Seconds later, a hoard of sprinting footsteps rummaged the silence behind the closed doors leading to the hall. A group of three entered at first, the fluorescent lights following their presence as the doors locked open behind them. Minho turned over his shoulder, noticing the dishevelled and half-asleep states of crewmates. Felix, strands swirling like a fresh latte atop his head in a mess of a nest, had barely awoken himself from a dream, and Seungmin may have as well dragged his blankets with him. Jeongin however, who had long found his place in his workstation chair quite comfortably, was wide awake. Bright, sparkly fox eyes focused upon the dance of his hands as he entered his security details into the system, and a loud tone of confirmation followed soon enough. In rushed the remaining three.

“I swear, if you called us here because of a false signal from some electrically charged dwarf planet again…” came the familiar sound of Hyunjin’s half-asleep slurs as he dragged his feet across the floor to stand behind Jeongin’s chair. The backs of his flat sneakers were scrunched under his heels, and one of his shirt buttons hung loosely by the crooked job he’d perhaps in his rush to the control room. 

“Cheer up, will you? This could be what we’ve been looking for for weeks,” responded with a mixture of irritation but unconcealed excitement Felix, hands working through his hair to split it into its respective half white, half black. He was offered no reply.

Silent tension ran high, so much so that the light hair on Minho’s arms, of course concealed by the bright ruby fabric of his suit, stood straight to its very root. He leaned his weight against the arm of Jeongin’s chair, cluelessly but curiously following the movements of his fingers as he typed rows and rows of letters and numbers in what he only figured was code. Hyunjin yawned but was silenced by the cold glare of their ever-tired second-in-command, Changbin. Jisung, yet to say something, gripped a fistful of the large, loose t-shirt draped upon Felix’s shoulders. His gaze upon their youngest could have rivalled Minho’s.

“Well?” Seconds later came Seungmin’s question. He also appeared to not have gotten much sleep. If Minho’s senses were correct, then he had probably spent an extra couple hours in the confines of the security room tirelessly rewinding the day’s camera tapes. He was always so meticulous in his search for discrepancies. 

Then, again, after minutes of silence. Beep-beep-beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep-beep-beep. And again. There was no doubt about it. “It’s a ship.” 

Jeongin’s words ran cold sweat down Minho’s forehead. “Are you sure?” He asked, masking the loss of balance in his legs by leaning closer over their youngest’s shoulder.

“More than certain, hyung. That was morse for SOS and it’s close. It’s in this corner of the galaxy.” 

The first sharp movement came from Changbin. With his coat draped over his shoulders, he rushed in his bare-footed state to the steering at the very front of the ship. Ringed finger flipping all switches one by one, he lit the ship to life, the familiar hum of engines and blessed ventilation crushing any remaining silence. All the rest, including Minho in his frazzled state, followed suit. Jumping with a force too great for his exhausted joints, the red-suited captain flicked on the controls of his station, then watched the rest of the crew gradually awaken, their own adrenaline shots working magic upon their leisurely muscles.

Galactical beauty moved like a museum piece around them as the ship’s engines roared to their mighty power. The whirring and crackling of electricity were silent and yet Minho was sure they all felt it tingling along their nerves as well, especially within the second silence that befell them. So much comfort yet anxiety. This could have been it.

“Hyung,” called Changbin from the front of the cabin. His gaze never left the large window that spanned from one end of his peripheral vision far beyond the other. “I have an object visible in the distance. Seems to be a drifting craft of some sort.”

“Is it possible that it’s a stranded ship? Maybe it’s the Germans or British-”

“Don’t be silly, neither of them has ships powerful enough to even cross Pluto’s atmosphere,” Minho cut directly into Hyunjin’s comment, quite monotonously so. His gaze focused on the tiny grey object that appeared as if a speckle of dust on white marble, and he watched as it grew larger. Eventually, with the distance between the two crafts significantly lessened, it appeared to size up to about a fifth of the S.T.R.A.Y.’s size, and with a build and design quite… impressive and unlikely.

Minho leapt out of his chair, walking until he could press a gloved hand against the glass and feel the icy touch of death from the other side just barely at the tip of his nose. His breath fogged up the glass, so he pulled away in the slightest but kept narrowed eyes locked onto the craft. Its shape was sharp, pointed to a blade-like tip at its front. It resembled the shape of a hawk’s beak, curved in the slightest along its wider back wings, if they could have been called as such. No flag or initial occupied its ashy complexion, though thousands of nearly invisible scratches in its paint revealed the silvery grey and copper underneath; it must have been hit by a meteor storm. 

“It looks almost human-made but… I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it before,” Changbin’s voice barely registered in their captain’s ears, but he sent back a glance to assure his attention. “Global designs back home abandoned the idea of a pointed front decades ago due to unreliable engineering and shielding. If this is made by humans, it’s probably old.”

“You would think aliens would find more effective ways of space travel than some failed design that’s obviously been tattered to pieces.” Jisung’s pressured humour was nothing new, so none of the team reacted. Their third silence ensued. This one, however, was short-lived.

Grabbing the attention of every single pair of eyes in the room, the maknae spoke. “There’s a man on there.” 

“A man?” Asked Felix, hair dripping in front of his eyes as he twisted over his shoulder.

“A man. A human. I managed to track that emergency signal to its source and it appears to be an on-body microphone. I followed that through to the database at Central and I came up with the name Bang Chan.”

“Bang Chan?” Minho moved away from the window, crossing the room towards their youngest in long, slow strides. His brows knitted together in thought as he pulled the glove off his right hand only to brush his fingers through his tidied brown locks. “Sounds Korean.”

“It is,” Jeongin responded, watching Minho as he neared and leaned against the armrest of his chair again. His attention returned to his control system and he turned the monitor on, relaying the information from the analogue, encoded messages for the crew to see. Contrasted with a screen of void-like black, blocky green letters typed out rows upon rows of information, all regarding the mysterious Bang Chan supposedly discovered on the ship. Finally, following the dance of letters and numbers, a slightly pixelated picture of a young face, almost exotic-looking, possessed the monitor. Locks of silvery gold fell along a smooth complexion, nearly touching eyes of deep, rich brown. “He appears to be one of ours.”

Minho hadn’t realised that, like before, the crew had crowded around Jeongin’s station one over the other in childish curiosity. Some gazes lingered upon the image of the man, but Minho parted from it quickly. With a step quicker than before, he forced his glove back onto his dry hand and crossed the border of the hallway. Rows of fluorescent lights followed his figure as he turned to hallways recently left abandoned but, along with the puzzled calls of Jisung behind him, he ignored. Reaching the cargo hatch, he pulled one of the reinforced oxygen suits from its capsule worked into the wall and threw it over his own. He never enjoyed the claustrophobic feeling of layers upon layers of air-tight material slowly suffocating his skin.

“Hyung, what in the hell are you doing?” Followed Jisung’s voice as the pink-haired chemist entered after him. His brilliant cyan suit was halfway undone and tied around his waist by its sleeves, a loose white t-shirt caught underneath it in an untidy bunch. It was rare to see him so unkempt.

With a scoff, Minho placed the helmet of the suit over his pushed back hair, shifting it side to side until the gentle click of the lock sounded over the stilled engines. Muffled by the glass separating him and the ship’s artificial pressure, he said, “responding to the distress call, what else?”

“But- you haven’t left the ship in weeks, the change of pressure might be too much for you to handle, especially considerin-”

“Leave the medical chastising to Hyunjin, will you Hannie?” Minho asked, already standing at the large locked hatch of the door and stretching the fingers of the second suit’s gloves to fit. With only a look behind his buffed up shoulder, he noticed the faint but surely present concern in Jisung’s chocolate eyes. Responding with a simple, typical to his nonchalant character side-smile, Minho flicked a wrist at the chemist, then watched as he hesitantly dragged his feet back across the rough metal. He stopped inches behind the door marker, shoulders slouched and with hands tensely fidgeting at the suit’s tied sleeves, and Minho sighed. Just before he turned and pressed the master lock button to the cargo hatch, he caught a glimpse of a couple of other figures approaching behind Jisung, figuring Changbin and Seungmin, perhaps the others too, had followed.

He stood there, perched on the platform’s edge with his gaze barely high enough to peak at the beauty of the Black Widow Nebula. His fingers lingered over the master switch as his eyes scanned over each and every speck along the concoction of red and black, analyzing their placement, their size, their brightness. His heart raced a million miles an hour, slamming against the casing of his ribcage like a power drill until the chattering of his teeth became a danger far too relevant. As beautiful as space was, his breath never failed to catch in his swelling throat every time he was to experience it at its most grandeur.

Five. Four. Three. Two…

The metre-thick doors slid open, and suddenly his weight equalled that of no mother than a swan’s finest feather. No turning back now.


End file.
